


sometime around midnight

by perennial



Category: My Fair Lady, Pygmalion - Shaw
Genre: F/M, Modern AU, Such drama, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 17:47:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5257844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you just have to see her<br/>you just have to see her<br/>you just have to see her<br/>you just have to see her<br/>you just have to see her<br/>you know that she’ll break you in two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sometime around midnight

**Author's Note:**

> {cast: michael fassbender as higgins; alicia vikander as eliza}

The bar is full of celebrants: finals are over, the school year is over, and for many present, college is over. Those graduating will walk the day after tomorrow, and then the campus will turn into a ghost town until autumn.

For one person present, though, the night is a return, a reunion with colleagues and the few students who bother to say hello. To say Henry Higgins isn't fond of bars is putting it lightly, much less crowded ones, but Hugh Pickering invited him and it has been a long time since Henry was able to say no to Hugh.

Henry spent the spring semester abroad, on sabbatical in India, and he would still be there had he not been summoned back for graduation exercises. Ordered, more like. He still has two months left, and if the Old Lady (the faculty’s nickname for the university president, their boss) thinks he is going to forget it, she has another think coming.

The ex-students present are evidently determined to still be hungover at graduation. Henry eyes them with distaste. He is remembering why he doesn’t patronize this establishment.

“You’re not really suggesting we drink elbow to elbow with this rabble,” he says to Pickering.

“Come have a pint,” say Pickering encouragingly.

Henry is on his second pint and finally starting to relax when Professor Pearce joins them. Pickering, always jovial, becomes downright ebullient with the aid of alcohol, and Pearce, always dry, becomes an unparalleled wit. The three lay siege to a corner table; holding their own personal comedy hour causes them to forget the rest of the bar for a while.

Henry is on his third pint and in the middle of an uproarious conversation about unfortunate experiences in foreign countries when he glances at his watch is surprised to see it is nearly midnight. Just as he looks back up there is a break in the crowd, and his stomach drops.

She is in a tangerine dress that no one else in the world could pull off but which makes her skin glow. Her hair is twisted up so that he can see the familiar curve of the back of her neck. She chatting animatedly with a group of people standing halfway across the room, and she wears the easy smile of someone whose sky is free of clouds.

Glued to her side is a dopey guy he's seen hanging around her on campus but thought she knew was nowhere near her league. Henry cannot look away from his hand resting on the small of her back.

Why should he mind? He doesn’t.

Well, but of course he minds ignorant, irritating people! People who do nothing to legitimize their existence in society! People who show up uninvited and unwanted and never take the hint that they are not welcome!

She laughs at something someone beside her says, and that neck of hers turns and her eyes fall on Henry. Her eyebrows lift; her smile momentarily slackens. He can hear her thinking _of all the bars in all the world_ as though she has said it into his ear.

His heart pounds as though he’s just finished a 200 meter sprint. He hardly hears Pickering ask him to tell the story of the time in the bazaar in Morocco. He turns back to his companions and tries to pick up where he left off, recollecting mis-translations and the resultant mishaps.

Her profile is to him but he knows she is watching him, knows it even when he cannot see her, because if there is anything in this world that Henry Higgins is super-hyper aware of, it is when Eliza Doolittle is looking at him.

His gaze constantly catches on the hand on the small of her back, until he cannot stand it anymore.

“Another?” he asks the other two, and leaves the table before he hears their answers. His own glass is still half full.

Crossing through the room is like wading through choppy, inattentive waves that can weave backwards and slosh beer on one’s favorite waistcoat. He is still nowhere near the bar when she breaks away from her friends and intercepts him.

All the lights in the bar seem to brighten. Of course the drunken waves make a path for her, like the parting of the Nile. She stands in front of him, tangerine, smiling, her brown eyes turned black in the dim light.

He feels as though his soul does not quite fit into his body; something has come unhooked and the edges don’t match up. She holds her gin and tonic extended away from her, her free arm crossed over her chest with her hand hooked around her opposite elbow, seemingly at ease, though both arm and glass serve as shields. The faintest scent of lavender follows her wrist as it moves. She always talks with her hands, even when they are full.

She is asking how he is, how his sabbatical went.

“Sabbatical left plenty to be desired. I’m the same as ever. Managed to stay out of trouble, I see, if they’re letting you graduate.”

“Let’s just say I’m happy it’s over. It would” —she casts a look at him— “have been nice to have my faculty advisor in the vicinity. Or, at the very least, answering email.”

“I’m sure. Good thing you’re resourceful.” Henry’s heart is thudding in his ears. It’s annoying. It is already hard to hear anyone who isn’t screaming. He points out his companions to her. She took a few courses of theirs, though not nearly as many as she did of his.

“I’ll have to remember to find them and say goodbye on Saturday.”

He asks what is next for her. He doesn’t really care, because he already knows the only part of her answer that matters, which is that she’s going away. But evidently the masochist in him wants to know just how far away she will be.

“New York. Cliché, isn’t it? I have a job lined up at a publishing house, translation editing, just part-time and I’ll probably be eating ramen ten times a week, but it’s a solid stepping stone.” Her mouth still forms words the same way. He had forgotten what it is like to watch her speak.

Someone shouts her name and mimes drinking, and she excuses herself to collect the next round.

He goes back to the corner table and empties his glass with one long drink. Pearce and Pickering watch him, mystified.

He manages to make conversation. This is the sort of challenge Henry Higgins has been able to rise to for years; it was the first lesson he learned as a teacher, how to turn off the rest of the world and focus entirely on the topic at hand. He feels as though his voice is speaking independent of him. It hears what the other two are saying, and answers them; every other point of his body is fixed on a point across the bar.

Then she is leaving. She crosses the room with the unknown guy. She is holding her purse and is waving goodbye to friends. They are leaving. She is leaving. She is leaving, with him.

Just as they reach the exit, she looks over her shoulder and meets Henry’s gaze squarely. The guy puts his hand on her back. A moment later, they vanish out the door.

He feels hot and sick. He clutches the tabletop like a drowning man in a shipwreck.

“Henry?” says Pickering. “Is anything the matter? Perhaps you ought to slow down—”

Henry storms out of the bar into the mild May night. They are long gone. He starts walking, blind to his surroundings, plowing through the crowd on the sidewalk, jostling passerby without registering their presence or their angry exclamations.

He replays the entire night, then the entire last four years, vacillating between fury and agony. Who did she think she was, showing up in his life like she deserved a place in it? Who did she think she was, speaking to him as though he has been gone just four days instead of four months?

( _What is she doing now? What are they doing now? What is she doing with him, right now?_ )

He walks until the restaurants and pubs and shops have become apartments and houses. Passerby all but vanish; the night is empty and quiet. His blood cools and leaves him feeling nothing but wretched.

He throws up three pints of burning brown liquid into a storm drain. He buys a bottle of water and a pack of gum from a 24-hour convenience store and sits on a bench, drinking all the water and chewing five pieces of gum back to back, like a chain-smoker on their first day of quitting. He sobers up enough to remember that he left his keys at the bar, on the table when he was hunting through his pockets to find some Indian currency he had brought to show Pickering, just before Eliza left. He’s in no position to drive, but he’ll need them, if he survives until morning.

He is a long way from the main drag. The walk back feels eternal, and much colder. He thinks about his sabbatical, about the upcoming school year, and feels empty. All the anticipation and passion is gone. The years ahead stretch before him, colorless, repetitive.

The bar has emptied somewhat—it’s possible to hear the music beating through the speakers, now. The corner table is deserted. He scans the crowd for a bald head reflecting the bar lights. He catches sight of his own reflection in one of the decorative mirrors on the wall and almost does not recognize himself: the figure in the glass is haggard, with dark circles under his eyes. Proof positive that all these people should go home and get a good night’s sleep.

Pickering is nowhere to be seen, and his keys are with Pickering. A quick pat-down of his pockets confirms the sudden terrible suspicion that his phone is also with Pickering. Henry heads toward the bar counter to flag down the bartender on the off chance Hugh passed them off to him.

His entire body goes rigid. For a split second he wonders if something was mixed into his beer that would cause him to hallucinate. Then she slides off the barstool and walks toward him and he knows it is all real.

"He left half an hour ago," Eliza says, and holds out his phone and keys.

He concentrates on breathing normally. "Thank you."

"Are you alright? You look like you got hit by a truck."

"Never better. Are you alone?"

“Yes.”

“Where’s your leech?”

“You mean Freddy? That's over.”

“Over.”

“A few hours ago, after we left. There was no point in pretending anymore. He was only ever a distraction.”

“Ah, well. I'm sure there’s no end of young men eager to take his place.”

Her eyes drop to the floor, hidden behind her eyelids so he cannot read them. The gesture itself is easy to translate, though; it had become a regular element of their silent conversations by half a year ago. Such a careful dance. Never one word out of place. He once spent two days reliving the sensation of her fingers brushing against his as she handed in a paper, and immediately thereafter booked a flight to India.

“I'm not your student anymore. Henry.”

“Yes, congratulations.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Is there something else you were expecting?”

She studies him, eyes narrowed, frustrated, hurt. “Why do you always hold me at arm’s length?”

“Eliza—”

“I've seen the way you look at me. And maybe you haven't seen the way I look at you—“

He shouts, "Of course I have, Eliza! Why do you think I went all the way to India?"

She goes white. The volume of the room fades behind the ringing in his ears. Finally she says, very softly, "Oh." She swallows. "I see." She shows him a tight, devastated smile: "Goodbye, Professor Higgins." Then she leaves, walking away without a backwards glance.

Damn—damn—damn. He doesn't know who he's cursing more, her or himself. He realizes he is gripping his keys so hard there are indents in his palm.

He charges out the door after her.

She is already halfway down the block, her figure half-bright, half-dark beneath the streetlights.

“Eliza!” he thunders.

She looks over her shoulder, and he can see the wet shine under her eyes. She turns on her heel and charges back up the sidewalk to him. The wrath of Eliza is rather impressive, really, here before him in all its heat and glory.

She pins him with her shining, hellfire eyes. "If this is your choice, Henry, so be it. But when you look around and find yourself alone, don't forget that I was brave enough to say what you couldn't. And don't make the mistake of thinking I'm going to pine away after you. I can survive perfectly well without you—didn't I just do it for four months?"

His voice is level, for all that he is breathing rapidly. "You might have, but I certainly didn't."

That throws her. Good. There is no reason why he should be the only one this unsettled. She has been irksomely calm all night.

She searches his eyes, unsure of what she is finding there, anger still clouding her sight. He can see her pushing down her hope—until something shifts in her eyes and elation floods them. She could always read him better than anyone else could, even at the very beginning.

“Eliza,” he says, and weaves his hands through her hair. “Eliza,” he says, and fits his mouth to hers.

She winds her arms around his back and pulls him close. They stand there for a long time, embracing beneath the pooling light of the streetlights, sometimes pausing to smile at each other, until a patrolling police car drives by and tells them this is their second warning, go home.

~

He books a flight to New York.

A one-way flight.

**Author's Note:**

> [ALL THE ANGST.](https://vimeo.com/18745596)


End file.
